


Strange, familiar

by hera_invictus



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brienne of Tarth is the Best, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Smut, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, POV Jaime Lannister, Post - A Dance With Dragons, Post - A Song of Ice and Fire, Protective Jaime Lannister, Slow Burn, Smut, but not that slow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:22:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24218821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hera_invictus/pseuds/hera_invictus
Summary: How much did prettiness really mean, he wondered?
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 26
Kudos: 183





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> meant to be cannon-compliant picking up where the books left off (with a smattering of GoT) in a broad general sense, but i haven't read them for a while and the libraries are closed, and i have no sense of overland distance or whether it's reasonable for there to be woods on the route they're taking, so you'll have to squint.  
> suggestions to improve the fidelity (or anything else) welcome.

I.

He padded along behind her in the gloam, following the light of her straw-like hair. The piney woods were quiet, and so were the two of them. Their first night on the road, he had asked no questions — her body language showed her in no mood for talking, and he had a strange sense of being in a dream, where questioning might break the spell. He felt alive and purposeful out in the wild with her, like a different man, a free man, a man who accessed some primal unclouded part of himself, uncomplicated by shame or malice. He had followed her away from his camp, alone, without any struggle or demand, the misgivings that might have occurred in the course of rational thought overridden handily by the absolute conviction in his gut. When he saw her with Oathkeeper, her face wan and bandaged, her blue eyes swelling out from it in the firelight, it felt like the time that had elapsed since their last journey together had been spent only preparing, laying the groundwork, and sometimes just passing the time until they were journeying together again, on their way to fulfil an oath.

But now the first full day of their march was drawing into the late afternoon, the sunlight thin and strained through the tall dark trunks surrounding them, their feet making soft noises against the needles that carpeted the ground. And he grew impatient. He was not a man accustomed to being patient, and without regretting their running off, he began to feel that her silence was unfair, uninteresting, cruel even.

“Well, wench,” he said, and had the satisfaction of seeing her start, though she didn’t turn around. “So the Hound has the girl and wants to see me alone. Perhaps you could acquaint me with the circumstances we are about to encounter, that I might not be slain immediately.” He’d spoken in jest, but when she paused and turned toward him, her face was closed, and his stomach twisted uneasily.

“We had better not speak until we make camp. These lands are crawling with foul men. We had better stay alert,” she said finally, curt.

Jaime lifted his eyes skyward. “Gods, you’re boring. Are you certain you’re a maid, with that great stick lodged up your arse?”

Brienne looked like she wanted to say something — which of course had been his objective — but something steely flashed in her eyes, and she turned away silently and walked on. Stubborn, pigheaded wench. He was irritated. But beneath that, he was unsettled — something was tight in his throat, around his heart, from the suffering printed on her bandaged face when she had turned to look at him.

***

A light snow was falling when they made camp in a little hollow tucked away into the side of a sloping land. They built a small fire, ate a small meal, and then sat quietly, huddled around the flames, Jaime sipping from a wine skin. Flakes of snow had settled in Brienne’s hair and glinted in the fire like a crystal net.

Jaime studied her. She looked older than when he had seen her last, wearier, yes, but at the same time it gave her a gravitas that had been missing; she had been serious as long as he’d known her, but painfully young, and without being simple, yet somehow naive. Now that seriousness seemed to have grown and coalesced into a power, something that made her a force to be reckoned with. And somehow this transition made him feel an absurd pride in her, a tenderness even, and a little twist of bittersweet regret for naivete now shed. “Brienne, how many people have you had to kill since I last saw you?”

Her eyes flashed across the fire at him, huge and dark blue in this light. Angry? Hiding something? But after a moment her shoulders softened a little, and she began to tell him of the fight in the ruined fortress. He listened with appropriate graveness, no japes, understanding everything that she related at a profound, cellular level, the swell of pride growing. “You’ve done better than many knights would have, wench.” But that was not when her face was wounded, he noted privately.

They talked on a little, telling one another more of what had befallen each since they last parted ways, listening to one another with easy understanding, somehow feeling at home in the snowy night, their frontsides warm in the fire, their backsides icy. He found however that he could not make her approach the subject for which they had departed Pennytree together, and though curiosity (and no little irritation) burned in his chest, another part of him — that gut part that had led him to follow her unthinkingly, with a feeling not unlike relief to be journeying together again, toward something with meaning — felt that it hardly mattered, that he would know soon enough, that it was enough to sit companionably with this strange creature, free in the woods.

Every so often she would touch the bandage across her cheek absently, making some microadjustment to its position. At one such moment Jaime fixed his eyes on hers, and with a tightness in his chest he saw the closedness there open just a little, and she told him, haltingly, about the monster.

“Gods, Brienne. He...bit you?”

“Bit, and chewed.”

Jaime was silent for some moments. Then, in a slightly strangled voice, “And how did he at last come to die screaming on your sword?”

Something like devastation passed over her face, and was gone just as quickly as it had come. “It was not I who put an end to it. He would have killed me.”

Both of them were unequal to much conversation after that.

The shrinking fire cast strange shadows across her face, illuminating different parts at different times. Her full lips with their hook-shaped scar, the horsey teeth peeking out, her freckles, a flush on her cheeks from the fire, the planes of her bones, her thin yellow-white hair sparkling with melting snow. Even with the bandage and the shadows under her eyes, she was … regal, he found himself thinking. Perhaps I’ve had too much wine with too little food. Yet the impression of queenliness remained. In spite of her frequent awkwardness, there was also sometimes a fierce, unconscious grace to her, a straightness of the spine, a solidity at the center that spoke itself through her simplest of movements, and the way she sat.

She had been through pain, and indeed it was evident that she was carrying no small burden of pain with her now, but he was somehow certain that at her core she was unbent. Not naive, never that again, but innocent — the enduring innocence of a good heart too innate to be polluted by trauma, though everything around it might fall away.

He remembered how ugly he’d thought her when they first met, how ugly everyone thought her, how ugly she thought herself. She certainly was not pretty. But she was familiar, so familiar to him now, a face he knew so well he almost felt possessive of it. He knew the crooked angles and gaps of her teeth, the outline of her mouth, the patterns of her freckles and scars, the long curve of her blonde lashes, and in that knowledge was a fondness, and a complacency in the belief that he was the only one who held it, and an aversion to the thought of anything being “fixed”, and above all a desire to keep looking at her. How much did prettiness really mean, he wondered, against the intimate charm of familiarity, against the deep-seated power of unassailable innocence?

II.

He woke in the watery gray dawn cold, aching, and sharp-set, and at first he could not see Brienne. Maybe it was these circumstances that made him lose his patience. Maybe it was the broiling, impotent anger that had filled his chest when she had told him about Biter and that had festered overnight without an outlet. Whatever the cause, when she appeared through the trees to the east, he was determined to know about the Hound and the girl and what was waiting for him at the end of this march.

Brienne acknowledged him with a nod, her weatherbeaten face closed again, her blue eyes shining out of it regardless. “Good morning, wench,” he said. “Before we take one step farther, I demand you acquaint your fellow at arms with the situation that lies ahead.” Brienne colored at those words and directed her eyes away from his, somewhere to his right.

“My lord, as I told you before, I must ask that you trust me,” she said.

“I do trust you, _my lady_ ,” he cried, exasperation edging into anger, “as you very well know. But it seems you are taking advantage of that trust. A man has a right to know what he is doing.”

“For gods’ sake, lower your voice,” she growled, and made to turn away.

“I will do no such thing,” he said loudly, honestly angry now, moving across the leaf-littered ground toward her, “I will have an answer. I will have the truth from you.” He grabbed her arm and spun her toward him, their faces inches apart.

Her eyes locked on his, and some of his anger gave way to uncertainty in that hypnotic connection. Her own cheeks and throat were flushed with feeling, and yet peripherally he noted something determined, dangerous even, in the set of her jaw, and the uncertainty became doubt, doubt about whether it was quite safe to needle the wench like this. _Something has changed in her._ She was in so many ways a mystery, but when he looked her in the eyes like this, she was in so many ways his kindred. He recognized her, like a creature does its conspecific in the dark. He thought he felt a tendril of emotion, something in her wanting to reach out to him.

A hawk landing in a tree off to the left, a long white snake limp in its talons, broke the spell. Then several things happened very fast.

When his eyes flitted back to her, it seemed she was reaching for her sword, and in the tension his warrior instinct took over and he slapped her right arm away, making to grab her left. He had barely time to register her surprise before her fist came around from the side and plowed into his neck, throwing him off balance and taking his breath. Here she hesitated, to her detriment; he took the opportunity to tackle her around the knees, bringing her to the ground with a thud.

He made to spring back but she kicked him with one of her seemingly endless legs, and he collapsed on top of her. But he kept moving, scrabbling up her long, lithe, powerful body and trying to get control of her hands. He could have headbutted her here, but the sight of the bandage on her face flapping loose at one corner, a hint of the horrible wound beneath, made him pause. And by some tacit agreement, she paused too, and there they lay, their steamy breath mingling.

“Must we always bicker, wench?” he murmured, deploying a caddish smile. But she did not return it, and to his discomfiture her great blue eyes were slick with tears. And somehow in that moment, he knew — nothing concrete, but the certainty that she was being torn by some choice that involved him.

“But surely, Brienne” — and he felt something electric run between them when he said her name so close — “if you wanted to kill me, you would have done so already.”

“Ser Jaime,” she whispered, and a tear cut a channel down her unwounded cheek. He moved his left hand to it, cupping her familiar, peculiar face, and there was a sound in his ears like the rush of a snow-swollen river. The fleshy lips that he had once thought comically oversized now seemed pillowy, ripe to bursting. And without rightly knowing what he was doing, he kissed her.

He kissed her, and kissed her, blinded by a white light, unable to stop. And after a moment of paralyzed surprise, Brienne kissed him back, longingly but deliberately, like a traveler in the wastes who falls upon a spring long after giving up hope of water.

With his hand on her face he titled her jaw back, exposing her ice-white, freckle-dotted throat. Her neck was incongruously long and graceful, almost swan-like, out of place next to her broad athletic shoulders and thick upper arms. And although some part of him was trying to call him back to his senses, out of this madness, he only really knew that he wanted it. He crushed his mouth against her skin, kissing his way up the side of her neck open-mouthed, the flat of his tongue sliding along her skin, his teeth grazing it, like he would devour her. She stiffened — too late he thought of Biter — but a sharp exhale of shocked pleasure escaped her and her hips arched involuntarily into his, drawing a growl from him as he dragged his mouth along the line of her jaw. His left hand still holding her upturned face, he moved his thumb to gently pull down her chin, opening her mouth to his tongue. The soft cushion of her full lips was fascinating. His tongue penetrating them found the familiar crooks and gaps in her teeth. He was really blind now, filled with hunger and terror alike, and it was like stepping off a cliff into an unknown galaxy, and it was like coming home.

Just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. A crashing in the undergrowth had them rolling apart, springing to their feet with their twin swords drawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eventually, sex


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks so very much for the kind words on the previous chapter, it's meant a lot to me.  
> note: in my headcannon jaime has widow's wail at this point.

III.

Jaime thought he could hear Brienne’s heart, thumping in her chest like his own. The whiplash from arousal to vigilance had their adrenaline screaming. But they were both soldiers, in their way, and their breathing they kept under control. 

The source of the crashing emerged from the trees, two outlaws dressed ragged, a strange symbol on the clasps of their cloaks. One had a sword out, and the other twirled a chain mace with a morningstar head. They had come rushing toward Jaime and Brienne as though to leap into combat, but they seemed to reconsider when the light caught the two blades of Valyrian steel, and they paused, breathing hard, a few meters away. The chain mace continued to twirl; the sound of the head lopping through the air was like a heartbeat. 

“So here we find you,” said the sword-bearer to Brienne, and something in his tone declared this not a general statement but one of recognition, addressed to the wench. Jaime darted a quick glance at Brienne, but he could not spare much attention from the interlopers, and her face was stone. 

The sword-bearer spoke again, peeling his lips back to show stubs of weak yellow teeth. “And you have the Kingslayer. Good. Our lady will be...gratified to know you have been faithful in your promise to deliver him to justice.” 

Jaime looked at Brienne, incredulity blooming. _No. Not her. She would not betray me. She would not._

Brienne’s eyes stayed fixed on the sword-bearer. “Return to your mistress and tell her we are coming. We have no need of an escort,” she said. Her voice was commanding, but Jaime thought she did not really believe they would do as she said. _And who is this mistress?_ He thought of Lysa Arryn in the Eyrie. But they were going the wrong way.

“Oh, but I think you do,” said the sword-bearer, grinning, and the mace-wielder twirled his weapon faster, his nostrils flaring in excitement; his lips were sewn shut with blue thread.

“The Kingslayer is not in bonds, we see. Your _captive_ is armed and standing by you. And he was not standing at all, moments ago” — breaking off to laugh stagily, while the mace-wielder snorted, his eyes popping — “he was lying on top of your great ugly hulk, getting ready to fuck you with his golden cock.” Brienne glowed a brilliant shade of pink, but the hands on her sword were steady, and her eyes looked dangerous. Absurdly, Jaime felt a little blood rush away to his groin at the unsettling memory of her body underneath his, her hips arching. 

“Everyone knows you’re his whore,” the sword-bearer whispered, and Jaime’s confusion crystallized into cold fury. 

The sword-bearer seemed to take some courage from his own words, and the body language of the outlaws shifted slightly. Jaime knew instinctively that they would make their move soon, as surely as if they had told him. And he felt that Brienne knew it too. _Luckily she’s used to being taunted. She will not lose her head._

“Give up the Kingslayer, whore, and we will consider your promise fulfilled. We will let you go,” the sword-bearer said. The head of the chain mace pounded through the air.

“This job was entrusted to me,” Brienne said icily. Long accustomed to men underestimating her, she knew the value of surprise, and when she darted forward with Oathkeeper even Jaime was caught off guard. 

She took the head off the mace in one swing. While its wielder was looking at the limp chain stupidly in the shocked pause that followed, Jaime took the opportunity to run him through. _That much I can still do._ Brienne had turned toward the sword-bearer, striding resolutely into his space and slashing at him as he stumbled backward on his heels, face aghast, each defensive block betraying that she had him off-balance. 

“You really are a freak,” he gasped through his stub teeth, when Brienne had him on his knees and Oathkeeper had sent his prosaic sword into the undergrowth. Jaime thought she looked like she was on the verge of doing something foolishly chivalrous, like letting him run off with a promise, or taking him captive. In the end he never knew, because the man on his knees launched himself forward with a dagger for her femoral artery, and she put her sword through his spine. 

They were silent for a few moments. “Friends of yours?” Jaime asked, an eyebrow lifted. 

Brienne took a great gulping breath. “We had better move away from here as quickly as we can.”

They piled the bodies into the hollow trunk of a massive old oak and cleaned their swords on the carpet of leaf litter. 

“Lady Brienne — ” Jaime tried diplomatically, preparing to insist on an explanation, but she was already turning away. 

“Come, ser Jaime.” Nimbly she scooped up the few items from their camp and stalked off doggedly, her impossibly long legs putting distance between them quickly. 

***

In the heat of the day, which was not much but enough to make sweat run under mail, they stopped by a low bubbling spring hemmed in by waxy-leaved hedges to refresh their water and rest their legs. The woods had thinned and yet there was a sense of enclosure, the birds were quiet, and there the tension settled over them like a sticky fog. Jaime watched Brienne filling her water skin, keeping her eyes and hands busy. It was too much.

“Listen, wench, you’re not clever enough to sell me out, so you had better tell me what you’re up to.”

Brienne looked up at him witheringly, but she was resigned. “I was released from the captivity of Lady Stoneheart on the promise that I would bring you back with me to face justice.” 

“Lady who? — And I won’t ask for what crime, since I've plenty to choose from.”

Brienne sat back on her heels and looked at him levelly. “She used to be someone to whom you owed an oath. Catelyn Stark.”

Various things to say occurred to Jaime, but instead he waited, and he listened, his astonishment mounting. In a long flow of words Brienne told him, about the painful horror of seeing Lady Catelyn so transformed, about the nooses laid round their necks, about the word she screamed. 

Jaime’s throat grew tight imagining her a captive, noosed for hanging, and at the same time, indignation rose in his chest as it became clear that what she had told him about the girl and the Hound had been a trick. That _she_ should trick him, that she should _dare_ , that she should be successful — it was not the sort of thought he was accustomed to bear. 

And before he had a chance to come to terms with this discomfort, it was also rapidly unfolding that she had hatched a plan: a pigheadedly noble plan to save Podrick, Hunt, and himself, possibly at the cost of her own life. _Of course_. She had kept it from him, for fear he would protest. The trick, and the plan, were to protect him; they were for his own good.

The veins in his head beat with incredulity. Exasperation, a little fear, and a stupefyingly frustrating affection spilled through him. “And this, this is what you think of me,” he said, almost to himself. _A maiden for you to protect, not trustworthy enough to be told the truth_ . But at the same time he knew what he would have said and done if she had told him outright, and grudgingly he admired her canniness. _Another way she has grown._ His good hand reached out of its own volition to grasp hers. 

Blue and green eyes glimmered at each other in the silence of the mid-day wilderness. The release of the truth had made her freckled skin glow; a light seemed to be pouring from it along his outstretched arm. “Wench,” he said, moving his thumb across her scarred knuckles, “have I ever mentioned that you are maddening?”

She looked a bit wild for a moment, like she would pull back, slap his hand away, but after a moment she turned hers upward and returned the pressure. In the relief of learning that he would not flee, or hate her, or fight her now he knew the truth, she laughed a little. A very little — but seeing a smile on her face, a real if flustered smile set free by the release of restraint, and of the deceit so unnatural to her, was like seeing the sun come up. 

IV.

There wasn’t time to linger, so they walked on in the dappled afternoon light, talking quietly, pine needles and old leaves soft below their feet. They went over her plan exactingly, Jaime peppering her with questions at every pause for breath, interrogating the minutiae. It was clever enough, he found, though with an appalling risk to herself. With his longer experience of battle and his easier instinct for deception, he was able to put forward some improvements, and they were quite at home in this give and take — two strategists pushing each other to think everything through, emotions neatly sidelined for the present. She was only stubborn about anything that would increase the risk to Jaime or to the captives, particularly Podrick, and her dogged loyalty, occasionally past the point of sense, needled him. Some long-hardened part of himself wanted to mock her for it, wanted to sneer at her earnest imitation of the chivalrous knight — it would be so easy — but farther in, at his core, he marveled at it. Farther in, he knew she was not really capable of imitation. 

As the shadows lengthened, they grew quieter, tired and hungry, vigilant, cold seeping back into their joints through their clammy skin. The evening temperature had dropped noticeably since the previous day. At last, when it was quite dark, they found a place to camp, sharing out some dried meat and hard bread. This close to their destination, without better cover, Brienne was loath to risk the light of open flame, but the cold was searing. At Jaime’s entreaty she admitted that they could not do without a source of warmth, so he assembled a pathetically small fire, and they crowded in close around it to hide its light, knees into their chests, and indeed crowding in close was the only way to benefit from its meager warmth. 

Now there was nothing between them and the consciousness of what had happened that morning — no interloper, no Stoneheart, no tactics to distract their minds from whatever had overpowered them when they collapsed to the ground. They were both hunched so tight that their knees almost touched around the little fire, and he watched the firelight play on her wounded face, curious and reassuringly familiar at once. He swallowed. 

“My lady, I hope — I hope this morning did not — I hope you have not—” He had had so much time to think of what to say, and apparently he had squandered it. “It was not my intention to compromise your virtue,” he finished, lamely.

She looked at him for a moment, gauging, he thought, whether the use of “my lady” signaled that this was a set-up for derision. But she must see that he was too awkward to be anything other than sincere. Her brows were furrowed in that peculiar way of hers, her hair and her skin were giving off a light like the moon — not golden like a Lannister, not silvery like a Targaryen, but a pearlescent lunar light that seemed to come from within.

“I don’t believe you,” she said at last. 

Jaime gaped. “You don’t.”

“No.” Her voice was calm, but he could just make out the flush rising up her neck. “You must have felt that I … returned your kiss.” She averted her eyes off to his right, as she so often did. 

“You did indeed,” said Jaime, brightening at an emerging opportunity to deflect with humor. 

But before he could, she said, still looking away from him into the dark distance, “So you cannot really be concerned that I, or my virtue, were affronted. Your real concern must be something else. You would like to put it behind you, perhaps — to forget it.” Brienne was maintaining a tolerable composure, but he knew her well enough to sense a tremble in the taut bowstring underneath. 

_Did_ he want to forget it? After all, she was the Maid of Tarth — huge, mannish, freakishly scarred, grotesquely strong, long-limbed, flaxen-haired, full-lipped, sapphire-eyed, pigheaded, resilient, resourceful, outrageously brave, loyal, innocent, fierce, compassionate. Jaime felt a confusion, a turbulent aching pressure, pressing down into his body from all sides. “I have only ever kissed Cersei, before,” he blurted out, looking at the ground. 

A beat passed. “I have never kissed anyone before,” she replied quietly over the tops of the flames. “Not like that.”

Jaime commanded himself to raise his eyes to her face, and she cautiously returned her gaze to his. Her eyes had turned a deeper shade of ocean blue as the darkness crept up around them. For a little while they said nothing, and they looked away and at each other and away again. Here they were, alone in the woods, on a preposterous and possibly lethal journey, somehow more naked together than they’d been in the Harrenhal baths. And still there was so much that was not said, still there was so much for which words would be inadequate. 

“And you don’t?” he asked, cutting through the silence, his voice thick. She looked at him questioningly. “You don’t...want to forget it?”

Brienne stared at him, and it seemed she was thinking about a retort, but at last she only said, perfectly seriously, “Why would I?”

Jaime did not know what he had expected, but this response startled him enough that he retreated to a comfortable japing intonation with a grimacing smile. “Well, I am a kingslayer, after all, and not even a whole and intact one at that. What would I be, but a stain on your immaculate honor?” 

There followed an uncomfortable silence in which they were both conscious that this artificially playful toss-away was in fact what Jaime was actually thinking. He looked at her earnestly, willing her to rescue him. He was embarrassed, and in his indignance at finding himself unmanned, he was close to committing some meanness to reclaim the position of advantage. But she was making it difficult, with her midnight eyes and her moonlit hair and her strong broad regal shoulders. 

“Ser Jaime,” she said, slightly wearily, “honor is not mutable by anyone, other than oneself,” and his heart moved at the quiet power in her words, the self-assurance unhampered by arrogance, the proof of that untouchable core whose vibrations he had felt around the fire the first night. 

“And,” she continued, “you are not a man without honor. As you very well know.”

He half-laughed, gratefully, his eyes shining. The night was cold and silent but for the building wind. The little fire went out, smoking feebly. They looked at each other in the moonlight, in the starlight; they were soft silhouettes with just the sharp bones of their faces gleaming. A sudden gust sent a shiver through Brienne, and Jaime could not deny that the cold of this night was more than he’d reckoned on. Their bodies had to touch, it was as simple as that. 

He moved awkwardly to slide or shuffle across the ground toward her, hesitated more awkwardly still, sat back, then with a late surge of conviction he was at her side, wrapping his right arm around her shoulders and squeezing her against him. Her body felt like another soldier’s, not like Cersei’s. He wanted her. He wanted her and he could not help himself. She was peculiar and magic and infuriating and he wanted to get close to that, to press up against it, to grab on to her sincere, stubbornly alive heart. 

They sat still together like that for some minutes, staring straight ahead at where the fire used to be, in the exquisite suspension of being both at ease and not at ease with one another. Hesitantly, like she was afraid of touching something sharp, she leaned her head in to rest on his shoulder, a more vulnerable gesture than he’d seen her allow herself, and one that required a fair amount of hunching on her part. He was reminded of how young she was, and he felt an almost panicked urge to protect her — ludicrously enough — she was taller, stronger, and (without his hand) much more reliable in a fight — but she was too faithful for the ugly world, he thought, too selfless. The light in her decidedly unpretty face made every other face seem boring, even repellant.

More nervously than he would have liked her to know, he leaned into her and came to rest his cheekbone on the crown of her head. “Brienne,” he said into her hair. He liked saying her name; it buzzed through his lips and into his jaw. In the stump of his missing hand, he could feel a cold rain coming. “Brienne, what do you see silhouetted on the crest of that low hill, two points to the left?” 

He felt her redirect her gaze, though her body did not move. “Is that — could it be a structure?”

“With only one collapsed wall, if I’m not mistaken, and no lights,” he said. 

“They might be asleep,” she replied. “Or there could be anyone camping there.” But he sensed her interest.

“We must chance it. Look at us — we will freeze else. We must get inside.” 

“Alright, then.” They stood and gathered their belongings. In the dark he smiled to himself at her matter-of-factness. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't worry they're going to have sex in that structure


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here we go. lightweight inspired by s8e4, but also not.

V.

It did not take them long to make it to and then up the hill, helped along by the moon and the stars that were not yet obscured by the thick clouds sweeping in from the north. It was an unpleasant scramble up, rather steeper than it had looked from a distance, and they were so cold from the now-biting wind that their hands could hardly grip onto the slender tree trunks and shaly outcrops along the climb. But soon enough they were before the structure they had seen, their breath coming hard in puffs of mist.

It was a small barn with a stone shingle roof and stone walls, the closest of which was in partial ruin, crumbling in a diagonal line from its highest to its lowest parallel. The slim iron chimney of a wood stove punctured the roof. 

They split up, each creeping around the perimeter of the barn in the opposite direction, daggers out. When they met on the other side, they wordlessly returned to their starting point at the crumbled wall. It was completely dark within the barn. They moved toward a gap where they could make their entry, holding their breath in to hide it. 

A bolt of lightning in the rapidly approaching clouds lit everything for a moment, and in that strobe Jaime’s eyes registered a half-full hay loft over an open ground level, floored with dirt at one end and wide planks of lumber at the other. He slipped in while Brienne remained outside, her eyes trained on the darkness around them for signs of a trap. The sharp smell of livestock came to him right away, but it was cold, old. 

When he reemerged it was with a grin. “Empty,” he murmured. “And they’ve left a little wood.”

With this wind, and the approaching rain, they agreed they could chance some smoke from the stove, a great-bellied thing that must have kept the herd and their keeper warm on chilly nights. Brienne built the fire in that quick efficient way of hers while Jaime climbed into the loft in search of straw. He pushed down the driest, least moldy bales he could find. Brienne broke their falls, reproaching him for the sound they would have made if allowed to hit the floor unhindered, while Jaime found japes to make about her ox-like strength and needless worry. They lacked venom, though; really he was impressed. 

They cut the twine bands with their daggers and spread the straw around in a pile by the wood stove. Over this pile they unrolled their respective furs. They stood looking at their handiwork in the light glowing out of the stove. It seemed unspeakably luxurious. 

Jaime grinned at Brienne. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to take off my mail.”

By tacit consent they turned their backs to each other, slowly peeling layers of leather and chain off their aching bodies, their fingers just warm enough now to pluck at hooks and buttons. When they turned back to face each other it was in only fabric. The necks and sleeves of their tunics were ringed in dirt and salt. Even with the stove, it was a little cold, and Jaime willed himself not to stare at the way Brienne’s tunic clung to her broad chest. His mouth seemed to be stuck in a half-smile, not knowing what to say next, and she did not offer any assistance. A concussive thunder rolled around them. 

Casting about, Jaime reached for his wine skin. He took a long pull from it and then held it out to her, dangling it in the tense space between them. “Come, wench. Have a sip. It’ll warm you from the inside out.”

Brienne, without letting her skeptical eyes leave his face, took a slow, impossibly graceful step toward him, her stride halving the distance without straining. She snatched the skin from his hand and took a long pull herself, her eyes still fixed on him. Jaime looked arch. She had surprised him again. 

He took a step in toward her, cautiously, and recovered the skin. “That’s put some lovely color in your face.”

“We should get some rest.”

“Nonsense. We should finish this wine.”

“You sound like your brother.”

“You sound like a prig.”

“I suspect that’s because you are keeping me awake, when I could be laying on a fur while you keep watch.”

“I would be happy to watch you lay on a fur.” 

At this moment the long-threatening rain exploded from the sky, driving against the stone walls, slanting in through the gap, making a curious rolling thud against the stone roof. Lightning lit them from the side, and then everything seemed darker, although the fire in the stove was still glowing. 

“You have been long from home, ser Jaime,” Brienne said, not unkindly. She didn’t say, “You must miss Cersei.” She didn’t need to. 

The look on her face — could it be pity? Pity, mingled with an almost smiling disbelief, one semi-circle eyebrow ever so slightly higher than the other on the expanse of her forehead.  _ What must she think of me? _ He swallowed, his eyes on her, wider, more longing than he knew. Her fine shoulder-length hair, hay-colored in this light, was tucked neatly behind each ear. With her spine straight as she stood close facing him, she was half a head’s length above him, looking down at him over her broken nose through filamentous lashes. No awkwardness could mute the impression of inner power, and no throne could increase it — she left nothing to be desired in a queen, he thought. And it wasn’t pity after all; he should have known better, from her. It was compassion, for the mighty, ruthless, helpless, flailing person before her, who in all his knowledge of battle had gained little of himself, still less of unselfish love, so that when he saw it looking back at him he very nearly did not recognize it. 

Still he waved it away with an irritated motion of his gold hand and closed the remaining gap between them, stepping into Brienne’s space with knitted brows. Discarding the wine skin, he grabbed her right wrist with his good hand and pulled her body possessively into his, even as he had to lean his head back to look at her moon-like freckled face. His ridiculousness in this position, trying to take hold of a woman who could throw him across the room, was immediately apparent to him and in spite of the teeth-clenchingly high stakes, without meaning to at all, he laughed. Brienne might have taken this as a slight, a cruelty at her expense, and all might have been lost, but clearly she understood and her lips turned up at their corners as she looked down at him. Her eyes were wistful, disbelieving. 

“King’s Landing is not my home,” he said hoarsely, quietly. He glared at her and their smiles faded.  _ I’m afraid it might be wherever you are, you mule-headed miracle. _

Brienne was conscious and uncertain, color rising along her jaw. He rose onto the balls of his feet until their lips were level, until he could feel her breath. Her eyes were huge and dark, and her body was still like she dared not move but he felt that she was ringing, vibrating underneath her skin. His eyes went to her mouth. Her lips were wind-bitten, parted, her teeth cavalierly crooked. He leaned in to kiss her with his heart smashing in his ears, more slowly this time, giving her a chance to back away. But she brought her mouth to his, tentative but eager, and he slid his hand into her hair and they were kissing again, a torment and a sighing relief.

It was like they were trying to drink each other in. He dropped his mouth to her long neck, his grazing teeth making her sigh, and his hand came to rest at her nape, where he felt the ties of her tunic. His fingers, long practiced from untying his own clothes one-handed, worked the knot loose and pulled on one end. The fabric fell away from her shoulders, her beautiful freckled shoulders, a scar slicing across her collarbone from where the bear had struck her. Without thinking he brought his lips to it. His eyes closed. He felt connected in a different way than he had known was possible, and he swayed a little, off balance. Brienne’s strong hands righted him and pulled his tunic over his head, leaving him bare from the hips up. He stared at her. The slightest of smiles was on her face, maybe invisible from a distance, or to someone who did not have the good luck of recognizing it.

In the pause, she licked her lips, steeling herself, it seemed. Then she peeled off her own tunic and let it drop to the floor. 

His mouth fell open looking at her. There were scars, bruises, and there was something irrationally and stubbornly appealing in the way she held herself. The small breasts he’d sneered at from the baths in Harrenhal looked perfect to him now, golden apples high on her chest. He cupped one in his left palm as his right arm wrapped around her back, and he closed his hand around it jealously, pushing it upward on her chest, then dragging his thumb across the pale pink nipple, making her suck her breath in through her teeth. He needed more — he dropped his mouth to the other and tried to engulf it, the flat of his tongue sliding up like a deep kiss while his hand roamed. She gasped and dropped her head forward over his, one hand pushing into his shaggy hair involuntarily, half-pressing him against her harder, half-clutching on for life. Her flesh under his fingers and mouth felt springy, powerful, but yielding, somehow both solid and soft.

He came up for breath and pulled her into him, both of them sighing when the warm skin of their torsos met. His mouth looked for hers again, his tongue pushing in as his hand slid down her ribs and over the curve of her belly. He slipped his fingers into the loose band of her trousers. He paused when he felt her tremble, but she kissed him hard to urge him on. He pushed his hand down, fingers passing through a soft pelt-like covering. When he felt her sex at last a jolt went through them both; she was hot, puffy, soaking wet. They broke off their kiss and rested their foreheads together, breathing heavily. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, he slid a finger between her folds, and the long, almost agonized sound it drew out of her electrified him. He drew his finger back and forward again, and her hips rocked against his hand irrepressibly, her thighs pressing in on either side. He wondered if she ever touched herself, like this or in some other way. He thought of her touching herself, thinking of him, and it made him groan softly, under his breath. His hand began to move faster, more insistently. Brienne was panting through her nose with her front teeth sunk into her bottom lip. His fingers were slick. But he wanted to see. 

Her eyes looked desperate and fierce when he pulled away but he said, “Let me look at you. All of you.”

She colored and he worried embarrassment would overtake her. He unfastened his own trousers, which had grown big for him, let them fall to the floor, and stepped out of them in his wool socks. To his great satisfaction, Brienne seemed torn between staring at his naked form and laughing at the spectacle of Jaime Lannister standing in an old barn in only his socks. The muted flickering shadows cast by the blaze in the wood stove were moving across his muscles, his scars, the V that seemed to be carved along his pelvis. His cock was hard, standing straight out from his body, throbbing in the cool air. He took it in his left hand and moved his fist slightly, lightly up and down the shaft. Brienne’s eyes were wide, pupils huge and dark in desire, and watching her watch him like that was almost unbearably exciting. 

Her gaze slid up his body and their eyes met. He smiled. “Now you.”

Emboldened, Brienne loosened her trousers and hooked her fingers into the waist. She hesitated a moment with them around her hips, and Jaime noticed how long and lissome her torso was. She was so tall that even with her long legs her torso was somehow long too. Then she let everything fall away and stepped toward him. Her own socks were airing by the stove; there was no comic buffer against the full statuesque force of her body. 

She wasn’t beautiful. Beauty as a notion almost seemed too little and parsimonious for her; she was a god. She was lit from within and she could throw an axe and she wanted him and it made his heart tight.

In one mind, they laid themselves down onto the furs, to their instant and mutual relief; their feelings were overwhelming enough without having to stay upright. He pulled her to him again, wrapping an arm around her as they lay on their sides facing each other, kissing deep. Their bodies pressed and moved together of their own accord. The feeling of her breasts dragging against his skin was maddening. She threw a pillar-like leg around his, and he grabbed onto her ass and forced her against his thigh, grinding her there while she moaned into his mouth, her bitten fingernails in his back. 

Not to be outdone, she angled one hand between them and caught the base of his cock. He cried out through clenched teeth, startled and unsettlingly aroused.  _ Careful now _ . He felt like a teenager. And her hand, big, broad, and rough, was wrapping around him, was covering an astonishing amount of area, was sliding up and down the shaft intuitively, making him shudder, and when her calloused palm slid across the head he had to jerk away. 

He tried to make her understand with his eyes. Hers widened with dawning comprehension, and she looked precariously close to laughing. “Surely not?”

“Brienne.” 

“The great Jaime Lannister!”

“ _ Brienne _ ,” he growled, and she looked at him seriously. “Are you sure you want this?”

“Are you sure you do?” She looked rather vulnerable suddenly. 

“Yes.” His voice was a hiss, his throat constricted. It was a small, simple word for a massive, complicated feeling, and it was all he could manage. 

He rolled her so that his good hand could find its way between her legs again. She moved to meet him, hungry for this new feeling. She was still dripping wet, still flaming hot for him. This time he pressed his middle finger to her opening and began to slide it in, the thickness of his digit straining against her tightness.  _ A woman so big has no right to be so tight _ . The thought of how it might feel around his cock made him delirious. He worked her slowly, feeling her open for him. She was making a sound he’d never heard from her before, almost a whimper. “More?” he asked her. “More,” she whispered.

He pushed in a second finger when she could take it and pressed the heel of his palm against the most sensitive part of her. Their lips found each other again, vibrating with smothered sounds. Her hips moved with him instinctively as he took her with his hand, a little harder, a little faster. And still he burned to get closer to her, somehow. 

“Let me taste you,” he gasped, breaking the kiss to drag his lips from her solar plexus down to her belly, his fingers still in her to the knuckles. He meant to put his mouth on her, his tongue inside her, but he felt her abdomen clench and she sat up quickly. He pulled gently away and sat up too. “Brienne. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” But she was unsettled. Lightning crackled overhead. “It’s just — ” Her eyes were looking everywhere but at him and he cupped the back of her neck, bringing their faces close, unwilling to let the connection break. “It’s just — too much.” Even in the soft light he could see her flushed skin. He understood her.  _ Too personal. Too intimate _ . She had been closed for so long, in her body and in her heart. As much as they’d come to know each other, still some things would need more time. He silently prayed that he would have that time with her, half-amazed at being able to think beyond the present moment. Then he kissed her, smiling into her mouth. “I know just what you mean, wench.”

Her strong arms snaked around his torso and pulled him back down onto the furs, hard, on top of her. “I didn’t say we should stop,” she said quietly, a ghost of a smile in her eyes. 

He opened his mouth for a witty rejoinder but she shifted her hips and spread her thighs so that the underside of his cock came into sudden contact with the heat and wetness at their junction, and all that came out of him was a strangled moan. “Wench,” he hissed. “I need you to tell me.”

“I … I want you,” she said, her lips feathering against his. “Jaime. Please.” The rain was drumming all around them. They were in a secret pocket of the world. 

Years of horseback riding had done away with the inconvenience of a maidenhead, but still she was tight, so tight. He was resting on his right elbow, his left hand trying to guide his cock inside her, and between her slickness and his disconcertedness his fingers kept slipping. They were both impatient yet so electrified that it hardly mattered; the contact was enough to make them moan. When at last he began to press inside her they were panting, their faces close, and as she stretched to take the head of his cock they both cried out. “Breathe deeply, my lady,” he whispered.

She did, her eyes on him, closing her lips to take long breaths through her nose. Her jaw was set in a way he recognized from battle. Pleasure and pain must be mixed together, but he knew her resolve and her almost contemptuous disregard for physical discomfort, born out of a life lived hard and bravely. He knew she would stop him if she chose. So he drove in further, his eyes on her, watching her cheeks hollow and her nostrils flare. The compression around his cock took his breath away. She made an animal sound and her back arched, exposing her throat to his tongue, his teeth. 

From there things became a blur of flesh in the glow from the wood stove. Their bodies strained and strove together, sweat beading on their skin in spite of the cold night. Thunder echoed in their ears. When he was in her to the hilt her hands were on his hips trying to pull him in deeper. He buried himself in her with every thrust, his pelvic bone grinding mercilessly against her sex, her wetness soaking him, her breathless noises making him wild. 

“Brienne,” he half-whispered, panic rising in his voice, “ _ Brienne _ , I can’t — gods — ” — she was too tight, too hot, the feeling of her muscled, scarred body moving under him was too wrong, too right — 

“Jaime — ” — his name tore out of her like a sob. The sound of it turned his vision white. “Say it again,” he gasped, not a command but a plea. “Say it again, Brienne — my name — ”

“ _ Jaime! _ ” Her head went back, and those incredible long legs tightened around him and then bent deeper, her hips straining toward his, faster now, both of them shuddering to breathe. 

It was too much for him, the sound — his head fell against her freckled smooth chest, his mouth open to taste her damp sweat, and the fingers of his left hand dug into her skin, hard enough to bruise. Somehow his name from her mouth sounded nothing like what Cersei used to call him; it was another word, in another language. A tremor passed through him as he pushed himself into her with a desperate drive, faster again — he was losing control — “Brienne, I —” — he was helpless — he was losing control — and when he felt her tighten vice-like around him he broke. From the base of his spine a cry ripped from him, ringing against her chest, mingling indistinguishably with her own, and he spilled inside her, over and over and over.  
  


VI - EPILOGUE

He kept watch while she slept, rolled in her fur, her bandaged face peaceful, her hair hopelessly rumpled. The rain had slowed to a drizzle and the greying skies were quiet. It was nearly dawn, and cold. He hadn’t woken her for her turn at the watch. He hadn’t felt like sleeping. 

He looked out over the crumbled wall into the rainy distance, taking a sip of wine for warmth. His body felt strange, in prime form yet almost slack, like a long-held knot had been snipped apart, flooding him with relief, and with an acute awareness of being alive. There would be no sunrise through the heavy bank of clouds and the thin curtains of rain, but it felt like the sun was coming up in his chest.

She shifted in her sleep and his eyes went to her, to the hook-shaped scar on her lip that he’d grown fond of, to the curiously long shape her body made under the fur. The Lady of Tarth. His stubborn wench, noble and rugged, innocent and perilous. Queen of the sword. She could have killed him, or fled, but instead she would try to save him, and to save her squire. What would they find where they were going? Would they survive the encounter? And if they lived, then what? 

He knew it was all important but in this moment he could not bring himself to care, not now. There might be a day when they would lose their luck. There might come a time when he would be drawn back to King’s Landing — surely he would face Cersei again. There might well come a day when he would fail Brienne’s expectations, when she would be lost to him. He was not good like she was, he knew that. But it was not this day. This day, he would watch her wake up, she would open her blue-sky eyes and see him, and they would walk together, in the rain, fellows-in-arms and something else, familiar and strange, unanswerable to anyone, and nothing would withstand them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes he kept his socks on the whole time


End file.
